Red Star over China (26 page)

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“But Li Li-san overestimated both the military strength of the Red Army at that time and the revolutionary factors in the national political scene. He believed that the revolution was nearing success and would shortly have power over the entire country. This belief was encouraged by the long and exhausting civil war then proceeding between Feng Yu-hsiang and Chiang Kai-shek, which made the outlook seem highly favorable to Li Li-san. But in the opinion of the Red Army the enemy was making preparations for a great drive against the soviets as soon as the civil war was concluded, and it was no time for possibly disastrous putsch-ism and adventures. This estimate proved to be entirely correct.

“With the events in Hunan, the Red Army's return to Kiangsi, and especially after the capture of Kian, ‘Lilisanism' was overcome in the army; and Li himself, proved to have been in error, soon lost his influence
in the Party. There was, however, a critical period in the army before ‘Lilisanism' was definitely buried. Part of the Third Corps favored following out Li's line, and demanded the separation of the Third Corps from the rest of the army. P'eng Teh-huai fought vigorously against this tendency, however, and succeeded in maintaining the unity of the forces under his command and their loyalty to the high command. But the Twentieth Army, led by Liu Teh-ch'ao, rose in open revolt, arrested the chairman of the Kiangsi Soviet, arrested many officers and officials, and attacked us politically, on the basis of the Li Li-san line.
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This occurred at Fu T'ien and is known as the Fu T'ien Incident. Fu T'ien being near Kian, then the heart of the soviet districts, the events produced a sensation, and to many it must have seemed that the fate of the revolution depended on the outcome of this struggle. However, the revolt was quickly suppressed, due to the loyalty of the Third Army, to the general solidarity of the Party and the Red troops, and to the support of the peasantry. Liu Teh-ch'ao was arrested, and other rebels disarmed and liquidated. Our line was reaffirmed, ‘Lilisanism' was definitely suppressed, and as a result the soviet movement subsequently scored great gains.

“But Nanking was now thoroughly aroused to the revolutionary potentialities of the soviets in Kiangsi, and at the end of 1930 began its First Extermination Campaign
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against the Red Army. Enemy forces totaling over 100,000 men began an encirclement of the Red areas, penetrating by five routes, under the chief command of Lu Ti-p'ing. Against these troops the Red Army was then able to mobilize a total of about 40,000 men. By skillful use of maneuvering warfare we met and overcame this First Campaign, with great victories. Following out the tactics of swift concentration and swift dispersal, we attacked each unit separately, using our main forces. Admitting the enemy troops deeply into soviet territory, we staged sudden concentrated attacks, in superior numbers, on isolated units of the Kuomintang troops, achieving positions of maneuver in which, momentarily, we could encircle them, thus reversing the general strategic advantage enjoyed by a numerically greatly superior enemy.

“By January, 1931, this First Campaign had been completely defeated. I believe that this would not have been possible except for three conditions achieved by the Red Army just before its commencement. First, the consolidation of the First and Third Army corps under a centralized command; second, the liquidation of the Li Li-san line; and third, the triumph of the Party over the anti-Bolshevik (Liu Teh-ch'ao) faction and other active counterrevolutionaries within the Red Army and in the soviet districts.

“After a respite of only four months, Nanking launched its Second Campaign, under the supreme command of Ho Ying-ch'in, now Minister of War. His forces exceeded 200,000 men, who moved into the Red areas by seven routes. The situation for the Red Army was then thought to be very critical. The area of soviet power was very small, resources were limited, equipment scanty, and enemy material strength vastly exceeded that of the Red Army in every respect. To meet this offensive, however, the Red Army still clung to the same tactics that had thus far won success. Admitting the enemy columns well into Red territory, our main forces suddenly concentrated against the Second Route of the enemy, defeated several regiments, and destroyed their offensive power. Immediately afterwards we attacked in quick succession the Third Route, the Sixth, and the Seventh, defeating each of them in turn. The Fourth Route retreated without giving battle, and the Fifth Route was partly destroyed. Within fourteen days the Red Army had fought six battles, and marched eight days, ending with a decisive victory. With the break-up or retreat of the other six routes the First Route Army, commanded by Chiang Kuang-nai and Ts'ai T'ing-k'ai, withdrew without any serious fighting.

“One month later, Chiang Kai-shek took command of an army of 300,000 men ‘for the final extermination of the “Red bandits.”' He was assisted by his ablest commanders: Ch'en Ming-shu, Ho Ying-ch'in, and Chu Shao-liang, each of whom had charge of a main route of advance. Chiang hoped to take the Red areas by storm—a rapid ‘wiping-up' of the ‘Red bandits.' He began by moving his armies 80
li
a day into the heart of soviet territory. This supplied the very conditions under which the Red Army fights best, and it soon proved the serious mistake of Chiang's tactics. With a main force of only 30,000 men, by a series of brilliant maneuvers, our army attacked five different columns in five days. In the first battle the Red Army captured many enemy troops and large amounts of ammunition, guns and equipment. By September the Third Campaign had been admitted to be a failure, and Chiang Kai-shek in October withdrew his troops.

“The Red Army now entered a period of comparative peace and growth. Expansion was very rapid. The First Soviet Congress was called on December 11, 1931, and the Central Soviet Government was established, with myself as chairman. Chu Teh was elected commander-in-chief of the Red Army. In the same month there occurred the great Ningtu Uprising, when more than 20,000 troops of the Twenty-eighth Route Army of the Kuomintang revolted and joined the Red Army. They were led by Tung Chen-t'ang and Chao Po-sheng. Chao was later killed in battle in Kiangsi, but Tung is today still commander of the Fifth Red
Army—the Fifth Army Corps having been created out of the troops taken in from the Ningtu Uprising.

“The Red Army now began offensives of its own. In 1932 it fought a great battle at Changchow, in Fukien, and captured the city. In the South it attacked Ch'en Chi-t'ang at Nan Hsiang, and on Chiang Kai-shek's front it stormed Lo An, Li Chuan, Chien Ning and T'ai Ning. It attacked but did not occupy Kanchow. From October, 1932, onward, and until the beginning of the Long March to the Northwest, I myself devoted my time almost exclusively to work with the Soviet Government, leaving the military command to Chu Teh and others.

“In April, 1933, began the fourth and, for Nanking, perhaps the most disastrous of its ‘extermination campaigns.'
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In the first battle of this period two divisions were disarmed and two divisional commanders were captured. The Fifty-ninth Division was partly destroyed and the Fifty-second was completely destroyed. Thirteen thousand men were captured in this one battle at Ta Lung P'ing and Chiao Hui in Lo An Hsien. The Kuomintang's Eleventh Division, then Chiang Kai-shek's best, was next eliminated, being almost totally disarmed; its commander was seriously wounded. These engagements proved decisive turning points and the Fourth Campaign soon afterwards ended. Chiang Kai-shek at this time wrote to Ch'en Ch'eng, his field commander, that he considered this defeat ‘the greatest humiliation' in his life. Ch'en Ch'eng did not favor pushing the campaign. He told people then that in his opinion fighting the Reds was a ‘lifetime job' and a ‘life sentence.' Reports of this coming to Chiang Kai-shek, he removed Ch'en Ch'eng from the high command.

“For his fifth and last campaign, Chiang Kai-shek mobilized nearly one million men and adopted new tactics and strategy. Already, in the Fourth Campaign, Chiang had, on the recommendation of his German advisers, begun the use of the blockhouse and fortifications system. In the Fifth Campaign he placed his entire reliance upon it.

“In this period we made two important errors. The first was the
failure to unite with Ts'ai T'ing-k'ai's army in 1933 during the Fukien Rebellion. The second was the adoption of the erroneous strategy of simple defense, abandoning our former tactics of maneuver. It was a serious mistake to meet the vastly superior Nanking forces in positional warfare, at which the Red Army was neither technically nor spiritually at its best.
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“As a result of these mistakes, and the new tactics and strategy of Chiang's campaign, combined with the overwhelming numerical and technical superiority of the Kuomintang forces, the Red Army was obliged, in 1934, to seek to change the conditions of its existence in Kiangsi, which were rapidly becoming more unfavorable. Second, the national political situation influenced the decision to move the scene of main operations to the Northwest.
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Following Japan's invasion of Manchuria and Shanghai, the Soviet Government had, as early as February, 1932, formally declared war on Japan. This declaration, which could not, of course, be made effective, owing to the blockade and encirclement of Soviet China by the Kuomintang troops, had been followed by the issuance of a manifesto calling for a united front of all armed forces in China to resist Japanese imperialism. Early in 1933 the Soviet Government announced that it would cooperate with any White army on the basis of cessation of civil war and attacks on the soviets and the Red Afmy, guarantee of civil liberties and democratic rights to the masses, and arming of the people for an anti-Japanese war.
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“The Fifth Extermination Campaign began in October, 1933. In January, 1934, the Second All-China Congress of Soviets was convened in Juichin, the soviet capital, and a survey of the achievements of the revolution took place. Here I gave a long report, and here the Central Soviet Government, as its personnel exists today, was elected. Preparations soon afterwards were made for the Long March. It was begun in October, 1934, just a year after Chiang Kai-shek launched his last campaign—a year of almost constant fighting, struggle and enormous losses on both sides.

“By January, 1935, the main forces of the Red Army reached Tsunyi, in Kweichow. For the next four months the army was almost constantly moving and the most energetic combat and fighting took place. Through many, many difficulties, across the longest and deepest and most dangerous rivers of China, across some of its highest and most hazardous mountain passes, through the country of fierce aborigines, through the empty grasslands, through cold and through intense heat, through wind and snow and rainstorm, pursued by half the White armies of China, through all these natural barriers, and fighting its way past the local troops of Kwangtung, Hunan, Kwangsi, Kweichow, Yunnan, Sikang, Szechuan,
Kansu, and Shensi, the Red Army at last reached northern Shensi in October, 1935, and enlarged its base in China's great Northwest.
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“The victorious march of the Red Army, and its triumphant arrival in Kansu and Shensi with its living forces still intact, was due first to the correct leadership of the Communist Party, and second to the great skill, courage, determination, and almost superhuman endurance and revolutionary ardor of the basic cadres of our soviet people. The Communist Party of China was, is, and will ever be faithful to Marxism-Leninism, and it will continue its struggles against every opportunist tendency. In this determination lies one explanation of its invincibility and the certainty of its final victory.”
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Here I could not even outline the absorbing and then only fragmentarily written history of the six years of the soviets of South China—a period that was destined to be a prelude to the epic of the Long March. Mao Tse-tung had told briefly of the organic development of the soviets and of the birth of the Red Army. He had told how the Communists built up, from a few hundred ragged and half-starved but young and determined revolutionaries, an army of several tens of thousands of workers and peasants, until by 1930 they had become such serious contenders for power that Nanking had to hurl its first large-scale offensive against them. The initial “annihilation drive,” and then a second, a third, and a fourth were net failures. In each of those campaigns the Reds destroyed many brigades and whole divisions of Kuomintang troops, replenished their supplies of arms and ammunition, enlisted new warriors, and expanded their territory.

Meanwhile, what sort of life went on beyond the impenetrable lines of the Red irregulars? It seemed to me one of the amazing facts of our age that during the entire history of the soviets in South China not a single “outside” foreign observer had entered Red territory—the only Communist-ruled nation in the world besides the U.S.S.R. Everything written about the southern soviets by foreigners was therefore secondary material. But a few salient points seemed now confirmable from accounts both friendly and inimical, and these clearly indicated the basis of the Red Army's support. Land was redistributed and taxes were lightened. Collective enterprise was established on a wide scale; by 1933 there were more
than 1,000 soviet cooperatives in Kiangsi alone. Unemployment, opium, prostitution, child slavery, and compulsory marriage were reported to be eliminated, and the living conditions of the workers and poor peasants in the peaceful areas greatly improved. Mass education made much progress in the stabilized soviets. In some counties the Reds attained a higher degree of literacy among the populace in three or four years than had been achieved anywhere else in rural China after centuries. In Hsing Ko, the Communists' model
hsien,
the populace was said to be nearly 80 per cent literate.